The cult of Black Madonnas in France and the statue in Le Puy-en-Velay Cathedral

Darkened with age, brought back from the Crusades, they belong to a tradition of black female deities more than 4,000 years old in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Asia Minor. In general, no single theory exists to explain how the iconography of the dark-skinned Madonna and Child spread across Europe. Today the cult is popular in central and southern France in particular, and goes back chiefly to the 11th to 13th centuries. The appearance of one of the famous Black Virgins, a wooden statuette 70 cm high in the medieval cathedral at Le Puy-en-Velay in the Auvergne, is thought to be the result of Byzantine influence. Set upon a high throne, dressed in a rich mantle of varying colours in keeping with the liturgical canon, and crowned with gold, the local Madonna has been venerated since the 11th century at least; popes and kings worshipped her, and pilgrims from all over Europe came to this shrine in their thousands. In the jubilee year of 1407 so many people came that more than two hundred were killed in the crush of the uncontrolled surge. In the years of the Revolution the ancient sculpture was destroyed, and it was replaced with a 17th-century copy.